An Open Letter to President Barack H. Obama

Dear Mr. President:

If you’re wondering why your party lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts, you should stop listening to what Katie Couric has to say about it, or Fox”News” or even NPR. They’re all going to repeat the same old Beltway bromides that your inner-circle of Clintonites (most of whom you should fire) are already telling you. They are going to tell you the same thing that Scott Brown is saying: the Democrats moved too fast on health care, have created too much debt, have gone too far to the left.

They’re all wrong. The problem is exactly the opposite. You and your party did not move nearly fast enough or boldly enough on health care. You let the bill get watered down and become useless. You compromised with the Republicans and the Blue Dogs. The Republicans, of course, are not now nor will they ever negotiate in good faith. Sure, Olympia Snowe might, but the rest of them are going to shoot at you no matter what you do. If you tack right, they will shoot at you. If you tack left, they will shoot at you. They are not interested in solving the nation’s problems because their base, rich people, are doing fine with the status quo, and their populist voters, the so-called Joe-the-Plumbers, have a long and sad history of voting against their own self-interests. The Republicans are about in gaining and keeping power. You should have moved forcefully ahead with real reform without them while you had the chance.

It’s too late now, of course, or almost too late. But this is an object lesson in American governance, and you’d do well to listen if you don’t want to become a lame duck after your first year.
In Washington DC, they think that if you’re not on the left and not on the right, you must be in the middle. This is idiocy. Some independent voters are actually far left: Greens and Naderites like me. Some are far right of various stripes: John Birchers and black-helicopter loonies. Some are well-meaning but utterly misguided libertarians. But the vast majority of independents, the so-called “swing voters,” simply have no strong political commitments whatsoever. How else can you explain the fact that many of these self-same voters voted for candidates as different as you and your immediate predecessor? This isn’t moderation; it’s mindlessness. In Massachusetts, they voted for Scott Brown even though he tapped into every fake-ass populist cliché in the book: the pickup truck, the open collar, the use of the words “shoved down our throats” and “real reform.” This isn’t change you can believe in; this is change you can’t articulate. The fact that swing voters couldn’t see through such flimsy political cladding means that they simply don’t know what they’re doing.

Granted, they think of themselves as moderates, but so does everybody. The fact that they hold few strong political convictions, however, translates into them supporting candidates who do, or who appear to. George W. Bush talked strong, and swing voters liked that: he made them feel definite, part of something stronger and bigger than themselves. He was a remarkably weak leader, of course, befitting his remarkably weak mind, but he had Dick Cheney around to do the heavy lifting for him. I hate to say this to you, Mr. President, as you are an intelligent and well-educated man and an eloquent one, but the swing voters voted for you not because of what you said on the campaign trail but because of how you said it.

If you’re thinking toward fall and the mid-term elections, and I suspect you are, then you ought to be thinking about how you can appear to be strong. And if you don’t want to get your nose dirty, as I suspect you don’t, send out Joe Biden to speak forcefully in public for you, and send out Rahm Emmanuel to break heads in private.
Above all, use language people can believe in and suggest legislation that will actually help. Don’t let conservatives in your own party get in your way; if they aren’t on board, they should be cut off come the next election cycle. That’s party discipline, and it’s another thing the Republicans do better than you Dems do.

Strong liberal leaders are ones who pushed through reforms that seemed drastic but were actually reasonable reactions to drastic times. Think FDR. They created programs that we all now love, like Medicare and Social Security. You may have noticed that times are drastic. You need to act accordingly if you want to solve real problems and leave an FDR-like legacy.

Oh, and if Scott Brown and John McCain want an open debate on the health care bill, give it to them. But use the old high-school debate technique of requiring them to come up with a better solution. When they can’t, be prepared with hard facts about how your bill is better and exactly who it’ll benefit. Most of you are lawyers, for crying out loud, and you can’t even win a debate with the simpletons on the other side? You can’t stop there, though. Congress may be about debate, but winning the public is about marketing. Hammer that message home again and again and again. I want to see and hear about a viable Democratic agenda as often as I saw and heard those damnable “five-dollar footlong” Subway commercials.

This is no time for compromise. The Republicans have had the ball in the right-wing endzone for so long that even a single yard toward actual reform of health care or banking or environmental policy seems like a victory. It’s too late to think incrementally: we need a touchdown, and, at this point, that will only come in the form of a hail-Mary pass.

Sincerely,
T.S. DeHaviland

Hiring for a Constancy of Purpose

Since it doesn’t look like my beloved Wichita Eagle is going to publish my editorial along these lines, I take to the neo-pamphleteering that is the Internet.

Few media commentators have even hinted at the fact that our recent economic troubles are the result of 30 years of decision-making at the corporate level. We didn’t really get into this mess because of the corrupt bankers on Wall Street; rather, their bad behavior was dangerous precisely because the “fundamentals” of our economy are, contrary to what this president and his predecessor have said, pretty seriously messed up.

The bad blood between management and labor is over a century old, of course, but suffice it to say that corruption in organized labor in the ’60s and ’70s made workers pretty ripe for managerial revenge. This took the form not just of anti-labor legislation under Reagan, but of what we used to call outsourcing, an idea that now goes under the more gussied-up moniker of globalization. It was like the weather, they said, an inevitability, they said: they being market analysts and investment bankers, CEOs and centrist and right-wing politicians, in other words, exactly those people who were likely to see a bump in the prices of their stocks and the near-term profitability of their companies if they got rid of their single biggest expense: the workforce.

And so it went. American companies dismantled their factories, shipped jobs off to Mexico first, then to China. The investment-class, bankers, and corporate types engorged themselves on the imagined wealth of very really rising stock values. But the market is a story we tell ourselves about value; GE was worth more when it fired workers in the US because the analysts said so, and the analysts believed it to be so because they were paid to believe. They acted as our shamans and we worshiped at their Manolo Blahniks, content in the certainty that we would soon enter a Golden Age of the high-tech “information society” where we’d all be “information” workers.

Sadly, as the Internet geared up, we found that it made information rather cheap, and so information work wasn’t really going to pay off all that well. But at least we could enter the “service” sector, which did turn out to be high-tech after all: we could sell Chinese-made high-tech goods at Best Buy. Part time. At a fraction of what we used to get paid for unionized factory work.

Fortunately, Alan Greenspan was around. Nobody understood what he said (think high priest instead of shaman), but he kept credit cheap and that’s what counted. We might not be able to pay it off in a reasonable lifetime, but we sure could rack up the debt, buying all those Chinese-made high-tech wondertools we love so well. Thus our manufacturing economy was turned, over the course of a few short decades, into one that relied for 70% of its value on consumer spending.

Are we Americans idiots with our money? Sure. But at least when we had real jobs paying genuine wages we could afford to be idiots. The supposed “best and brightest” on Wall Street turned out not to be much smarter than Average Joe: they figured out that with easy credit and all the money that was diverted from defined benefits programs into 410ks, they could leverage huge amounts of money for very risky investments that promised massive returns. And the rest is recent enough history that I need not repeat it here.

The problem isn’t that these people gambled away all our cash. The problem is that we have nothing with which to replace it but more gambling. We have long since sold all the tools we used to have to actually make things. We are like a carpenter who sold his plane and chisel and saw and blew the proceeds on a trip to the casino. If you are wondering why the “recovery” has been jobless, just think of this man. The Wall Street bailout began by Bush and continued by Obama has simply been like a rich uncle borrowing money from the mob (in this case our biggest creditor, the Chinese) to give to our gambling-addicted carpenter so he can head back to the craps table.

Gutting America’s manufacturing base wasn’t the weather; it was the result of conscious decisions on the part of some very wealthy and powerful people. It was stupid because the American worker and the American consumer are the same person. The rich got their revenge on labor. But they also their comeuppance and had to be rescued.

We need not bring back organized labor to solve this problem. If unions disturb you, then forget about them. There’s a much simpler solution, and none other than Henry Ford understood the fundamentals of it. Ford was no friend of labor, but he did realize that if you want a customer base for your new product–the Model T, in his case—the best way to get one was to build one. So he paid his workers $5 a day, enough to able to afford a Model T on the installment plan.

We need to do something similar but on a national scale. I propose a relatively simple piece of legislation: make it law that if you want to sell a product in the United States you must employ a number of Americans proportionate to your sales. They wouldn’t have to be manufacturing workers; they could be designers or engineers, salespeople or repairmen, but they must be Americans. This law would pertain to both US and foreign companies. No one doing substantial business here would be off the hook: if you want to sell here, you must hire here, period.

Obviously, very small and boutique producers would be exceptions. A guy building custom kayaks in his garage in Finland need not hire any Americans if he wants to sell a few here. But then, he’ll be no threat to the Coleman company’s canoe business.

Naturally, fiscal conservatives will howl that this is a protectionist measure, government interference in the natural workings of the market, a dangerous manipulation, and so and so forth. But then, wasn’t all the union-busting of the ’80s at the behest of the corporate classes government interference? Wasn’t the creation of a massive and risky market in derivatives a manipulation? Wasn’t all that packaging of “globalization” and the “information society” to a desperate workforce manipulation? Isn’t even the idea that the investors are “job creators” when they are busy outsourcing and downsizing and laying off also a manipulation?

More to the point, the free-market fundamentalists have had thirty years to prove their case, that letting them run the economy will lead to unprecedented wealth for all Americans. They have failed to make that argument work in the real world.

Is it protectionist? That I freely allow. But it is no more protectionist than what the Chinese do when they insist that they won’t buy Boeing’s 787 unless a certain portion of the plane is made in China. Since it has become fashionable to hold the Chinese up as paragons of the virtues of globalization, let’s at least be on par with them in terms of protecting what we worked so hard after World War Two to achieve.

A more damning counter-argument is that my proposal would push American companies offshore permanently, that they would just set up shop in Dubai or Hong Kong for good. If they are really that disloyal, let them go. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, already has. Arguably, the real money to be made isn’t in the US anymore but in emerging economies like China and India. Perhaps so. But those economies still rely on ours as the place to sell all the junk we used to make. The Chinese hold so much of our debt not just because they want a certain amount of geopolitical leverage with us but also to shore up their own most lucrative market.

Besides, the parsimony that follows centuries of hardship isn’t going to be wiped out overnight. Asians are savers in ways we haven’t been since the wake of The Great Depression. The Chinese and other Asian people are also infused with Confucian values that honor prudence and fiscal restraint. Even tried-and-true Madison Avenue tactics won’t make these emerging market buyers go into debt to buy the latest consumer goods the way Americans already do. By making companies that sell here hire here, we would, like Ford, effectively be underwriting a line of credit to the American people, one we work and produce for and that’s based on something real, not one floated on a credit card application and a prayer to High Priest Greenspan.

But it would have an ancillary effect: low-risk investors and banks could reserve some of their money for businesses that would have a solid customer base and that actually made things. They would not feel forced into derivatives and collateralized debt obligations in order to keep up with the market or hedge against its uncertainties. And then perhaps those of us who actually save our money might be rewarded for it instead of being punished with interest rates below the rate of inflation.

Rather than being a radical law, this one would create a foundation for those values that conservatives claim to hold dear: hard work, personal initiative, prudence, patriotism. These values are only meaningful if they are allowed to flourish, if we can create a system in which they are rewarded rather than punished, in which they are not ridiculed as the follies of the overly-cautious but as the best practices of the economically wise.

The Fool’s Errand of the Security State

The Christmas attempt to take down an American airliner and the following and predictable obsession with security is simply another reminder of how far we are from “defeating” the terrorists.

More pat-downs and high-tech scanners won’t do a thing; as long as there are sufficient numbers of people who are upset with Western foreign policy, a few of them will be motivated to randomly kill Westerners.

So here’s an idea: stop doing things that piss off the terrorists.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but neither is building an ever-more invasive security regime. The difference between the two is that the former works and the latter does not.

And if anyone seriously believes that this would be somehow “coddling” terrorists or “negotiating” with them, consider that the terrorists may actually have a legitimate beef with us. That they choose an illegitimate means to redress their grievances is immaterial to their claims.

We know this process works because the British used it successfully to disarm the IRA. Granted, it took them a century of “troubles” to figure this out, but the violence in Northern Ireland has considerably declined since the Brits started listening to and taking seriously Sinn Fein’s complaints.

By not listening to the Afghans, Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and so forth who are angry at us, we merely prove their case: that we don’t view them as fully human, as enough like us to have genuine thoughts and feelings. Thus we doom ourselves to another forty years or more of terrorism.

Who We Want Dead: a Taxonomy

This essay was inspired by an NPR story on depression and other psychological disorders among college students. The story presented itself as an investigative report revealing the relative lack of counseling and mental health support services colleges and universities are able to provide in comparison to an increasing need. As serious as this issue is, it brought up a much more serious issue in my mind: we as a society clearly don’t want people to kill themselves and spend money on suicide prevention and counseling (even if it is inadequate), but at the same time, we don’t feel the need as a society to spend the money it takes to prevent people from dying of ordinary illnesses by providing everyone with health coverage. Likewise, while we don’t want people to kill themselves, we also don’t want to improve their quality of life and extend overall life expectancy by assuring a living wage, or, for that matter, adequate nutrition or clean water or breathable air to all of our citizens.

Given this seeming disconnect, I asked myself what, exactly, it was about suicide (as opposed to physical disease or simple starvation) that we find so repugnant as to merit actual economic attention. The answers I came up with led me down some disturbing pathways indeed.

Many of us object to suicide on traditionally Christian grounds. The preponderance of Catholics and conservative Protestants contend that your life does not belong to you; rather, it is a gift from God that you have no right to reject. Therefore, it is wrong to permit suicide since it is a sin, ie an affront against God. This is problematic in a secular society for a variety of more or less obvious reasons, and one wonders if perhaps the church organizations that profess these theological strictures could do more to support suicide prevention independent of government mental-health agencies. Even more disturbing is the idea brought forth by certain conservative Christians that suicide is pernicious because it is the “easy way out,” and that all human suffering is because God has a “plan” or a “reason” for it. This postulates a cruel torturer-God that may appeal to fans of Jack Bauer but has serious cosmological implications. Besides, isn’t this the God the Book of Job exists to refute? The Lord-as-Earthly-Torturer, however, does satisfy important criteria for determining in the minds of these Christians who deserves to live or die, who is worth saving and who is not, who is “guilty” and who is “innocent.” Making sure potential suicides are not able to act on their thoughts is one way of forcing people to face their perceived sins and accompanying guilt. This has little or nothing to do with why people want to commit suicide to begin with, of course, and fails to account for the psychological and neurochemical pathways to despair, but it does make those who are suffering but not suicidal more comfortable in their decision to remain alive.

In the same way, many of us not of the fundamentalist bent shore up our own right to exist by condemning large groups and often entire nations by labeling them “enemy” and waging war against them. Terrorists are the popular bogeys these days, but in times past they’ve been Communists, “gooks,” Nazis, “Krauts,” “Injuns,” rebels, Yankees, Redcoats, and many species of Other the existence of whom was considered either a threat or a pestilence or both. Enemies forfeit their right to live through incorrect thought and ideology (Communists) or through perceived behavioral problems (terrorists, “criminals”) or some combination of the two, usually resulting in the label “evil” (Nazis, terrorists again). The more not like ourselves we want the enemy to seem, the more likely we’ll label them “evil.” We reserve the term “pure evil” for those whose humanity we want to entirely revoke.

In the U.S., we claim not to desire the death of those who are simply the wrong ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation. But we have frequently acted differently, notably with our 19th Century policy of killing and displacing Native Americans. To prove our good faith, we often destroy others through abuse or neglect rather than active extermination, as we did with Africans enslaved to work our southern plantations and as we continue to do with the poor. But more on that later.

Extremes on the political Right often try to link those whose behavior they think worthy of death with ethnicity or what they see as theological or ideological perversions. This may inadvertently reveal their own inner motivations or biases, but lately there has been little attempt to hide even those. Extremists on the Right declare “Islamo-fascism” to be the motivating factor behind terrorism, or, at an even greater extreme, blame Islam itself as a hateful and violent faith that must be dealt with in a hateful and violent way. At its most extreme, this position would advocate the elimination of perhaps a billion people, about one-sixth of the the world’s population, unless those wrong-believing Muslims convert.

Attempts at conversion by the sword are nothing new, particularly when Islam and Christianity clash, and extremists on the Muslim side are no less fervent in their assumption that Christians should either follow Mohamed or die. The eschatological implications for both sides are quite dire, with the destruction of between four and five billion people at stake either through supernatural intervention or divinely inspired “holy war.”

I bring up these extreme examples in order to compare them to those who (merely) seek the destruction of others because of their perceived behavioral or character flaws. This tends to be the position of the Center-Left in the U.S. which, like most of Europe, places terrorism in the law-enforcement category and not a good candidate for war. For them, the problem is the terrorist as an individual, whose poor decision-making or because of personal issues has been led to a life of violent struggle. This approach, at least, since it is individualized, tends to lead to less killing, but seldom to none. Timothy McVeigh was a widely acknowledged terrorist the U.S. put to death, as we would Osama bin Laden if captured alive. That President Obama promises bin Laden will be “brought to justice” puts him in this camp in theory, even though his recent decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan indicates otherwise.

Most Americans, no matter our politics, share some of this view, and it arises either from the the need to enforce theological precepts of innocence and guilt or from ideas about the “proper” way to enforce “the rule of law” or “social order.” Upwards of 80% of Americans support the death penalty for certain crimes, though which crimes and what aggravating factors should trigger it vary. This leaves a mere 20% of Americans, on our most merciful day, who think that others should not be killed for their misbehavior.

Ideology continues to be a motivating factor to kill, and it was the primary reason the U.S. invaded Vietnam and Korea, and it was the professed reason Stalin killed so many of his own people—though the primary reason was no doubt simple paranoia. Poorly practiced ideology also led Chairman Mao to let millions of his own peasants die of starvation, but that event may be better placed in the neglect section below. Ideology is a clear motivating factor in the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and in some of the civil wars in Africa following decolonization. The most obvious example is Nazism, which used its ideological precepts to justify both its expansionist war and its internal genocide against Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and anyone else deemed undesirable by fascist eugenics. By a very rough estimate, between 10 and 50 million people were killed during the 20th Century alone due to ideological warfare. But, of course, these numbers could not be so large if the notion of the nation-state were not still with us. The nation-state concept ties ideology to the leadership of a country and, theoretically, as the regime goes, so goes the population. In longstanding totalitarian regimes such as North Korea, this may come close to the truth. But in practical terms, the vast majority of those targeted because of perceived ideological deficiencies hold few strong convictions and are simply unfortunate enough to have leaders whose viewpoints are seen as problematic by other leaders.

The nation-state concept also links killing because of ethnicity closely to that of killing due to ideology. We are mostly members of a nation by birth, just as we are born into an ethnicity. Despite that, recent wars in the Balkans, Rwanda, the Congo, and currently in Darfur are still waged on the premise that enemies are worthy of destruction because they are members of an undesirable ethnic group. World opinion claims that this is a poor reason to kill, but we in the developed world are not so appalled as to actually do anything about it except, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, when it’s close to our own dominant ethnic homeland (Europe) and/or the people there look like the majority of us. This may also reveal deep-seated ethnic bias, and while we may not actively want the people in Darfur to die, neither are we sufficiently moved to try to keep them alive.

This brings us back to the other way we condemn people to death, neglect and abuse, and brings us back to the problematic question of suicide prevention that created this paroxysm of thought. In the United States, the poor are often also members of ethnic minorities, and so the decisions by the ruling classes to let them suffer and die may be based on ethnic biases. But it is also a question of ideology and bad behavior: capitalism postulates economic failure is a result of an inability to compete in the marketplace because of bad character or poor decision-making. Thus the poor are simply not fit to live, or at least not fit to thrive. The market has spoken on the matter and found them wanting. When the underclasses petition the government for redress, the successful capitalist–who has obviously done the “right” thing, made the “right” decisions, had “what it took” (ie. the right character)–feels imposed upon. He would rather these people be “taught” the “lesson” of the marketplace than be helped because it reinforces his ideological position. So in a capitalist state, the poor are deserving of neglect because, while perhaps innocent of out-and-out malice, they are guilty of not “helping themselves.”

This ideological/behavioral approach can be scaled up to the global level. Presently, some one billion people are in danger of starving to death, which from the perspective of the neo-conservative “global marketplace” is just fine. Still, I can’t help but see this as also a problem of class combined with good old-fashioned xenophobia: the world’s rich and middle-class are “us” and the poor are “them.” We haven’t really “earned” the wealth we were born into, but it defines us over and against those whose births were not so blessed.

What I find so disturbing about these thoughts is that despite all of our protestations to the contrary, nearly all of us want someone or some group of people dead, generally for reasons we could readily change if we wanted to. That we don’t want this points to either some deep-seated need to reinforce an internal viewpoint or, perhaps, some deep-seated need to justify or exercise a homicidal urge. Some argue that certain circumstances like war make it “necessary” to kill or let others die but that we find the notion personally repulsive. If that is so, then why are we not more willing to find alternative ways to meet the necessity that will spare the life? The necessity position fails unless and until every possible means, as is already the case in suicide prevention, has been exhausted first.